Homebrewing for Dummies – by Marty Nachel

Homebrewing for Dummies – by Marty Nachel
A Reference for the Rest of Us!

Covers everything from A-Z in brewing. A good text if you only had one book to buy and were a raw beginner. Some of the specialty chapters are worth checking too and go way beyond a what you might expect from a watered down ‘dummies’ book. The chapters on the ingredients in beer, needed equipment, extract brewing, bottling and kegging are good. The emphasis on secondary fermentation is good. I found the all-grain section a little oversimplified, enough information to get started but not enough to get past the basics. A good chunk of the book (100 pages out of about 400) is recipes, with extract and all grain variations on almost every style of beer. Then the book gets interesting and goes into cider and meads, a topic you rarely see. Then it gets even more interesting with a chapter on gluten free brewing (making beer without standard barley or wheat). Also covers green practices in brewing and organic ingredients, judging beer, and beer troubleshooting.

Topics unique to the book:

• Emphasis on secondary fermentation
• Basic intro to all grain brewing
• First Wort Hopping (covered in chapter 12 on all grain brewing)
• Brewing cider at home
• Brewing mead and its sub categories – traditional, melomel (fruit), and others (braggot, metheglin) in dry or sweet variations.
• Brewing green and using organic ingredients
• Gluten free brewing
• Home brew competitions and beer tasting
• Beer quality troubleshooting